


Follow the Orange Of the Setting Sun

by cricket_aria



Category: Chronicles of Narnia - C. S. Lewis, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Arya's found peace, Crossover, Future Fic, Gen, homecomings, unexpected matchmaker
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-11
Updated: 2019-10-11
Packaged: 2020-11-27 11:04:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,937
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20947301
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cricket_aria/pseuds/cricket_aria
Summary: Six years after Arya sailed West she returns home. And she brings a potential gift for Sansa with her.





	Follow the Orange Of the Setting Sun

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Ashling](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ashling/gifts).

> Posted for the Writing Rainbow Orange exchange, forward dated upon author reveals.

When Arya had left for the West Sansa had known that she’d never see her again. Bran was still within reach, Jon not so far that she couldn’t track him down, but no one had ever sailed West and returned again. She tried her best to believe that whatever those past explorers had found beyond the horizon was something so glorious that they’d never wanted to return again, and not simply a messy death.

She tried to believe it, but it was much too late to bring the part of herself that had once believed in fairy stories back to life.

So she had known that Arya was gone. For the first five years of her reign she’d known, kept the knowledge that even one of her siblings who’d managed to survive the war hadn’t really survived it locked in her chest as a tight pulsing pain just like all those other losses over the course of it. Learned once more to live around that strengthened ache.

Then, near the end of the sixth year, a raven came to Winterfell with word that a ship flying the Stark sigil had come into White Harbor, and her sister was close behind it. 

Sansa was at court when Arya arrived, and tried not to feel hurt that she was alerted to it by a whisper in her ear instead of by her sister coming to her directly. Still, she wasn’t able to fully shake the feeling off until she found her down in the kitchen, and saw her stuffing food into her face like she hadn’t eaten in weeks. From the look of her maybe she hadn’t, or maybe Sansa had just never had the chance to see what her face would become once the last of the babyfat finally fell off it.

“Sorry,” Arya said around a mouth full of bread soaked in stew, “I rented a horse and came straight here after we docked, never stopped at House Manderly to fill my stomach, and supplies were getting lean by the end there. Tried hunting some on my way, but I didn’t have much luck.” 

She didn’t seem able to tear herself away from the food long enough to stand so Sansa walked around behind and leaned low to wrap her arms tightly around her torso, pressing their cheeks together heedless of the streak of grease it left along her face and into her hair. “I’m so glad to see you safe,” she whispered fiercely.

Arya bumped their foreheads together lightly, letting one hand fall from her bowl long enough to cover Sansa’s hand and squeeze. “I never planned to die out there, you know,” she said softly back. “And now I’m the first explorer who can tell you I’m pretty sure that’s not what happened to anyone else who tried making the journey either. Not if they made it as far as they could go.”

From the sly look in her eye Sansa could tell there would be no getting more than that out of Arya until she was ready, that she’d only put it out there to try to rouse Sansa’s curiosity. It was good to see her like that, content and teasing in spite of her hunger in a way she hadn’t been since they were children.

More than she’d been even then, if Sansa thought about it honestly. When they were children Arya had always been chaffing against the lady she was expected to be. Now she was entirely herself, no pressure to be anything else, and better for it.

Sansa decided not to rise to her teasing, kissing her on the forehead and straighting instead. “I don’t want to disturb you when you’re obviously so hungry. Come find me in my rooms once you’re done and I’ll look forward to hearing all about your travels. I’ll make sure the guards know to let you go anywhere you’d like.”

Arya’s smile went a tiny bit sharper at that, a little bit more like the girl she’d been during the war. “You think they’d be able to keep me out anyway?”

Sansa smiled back and shook her head. “I’m sure they wouldn’t, but please try not to torment the guards. This is still your home too, you know.”

* * *

“The further west we sailed the stranger everything got,” Arya was saying later. They were both curled up in front of the fire in Sansa’s chambers, dressed in their nightclothes and robes and sipping sweet hot tea like they were children again. “There was an island of people with giant long arms who walked around on their hands, and one where everything you fantasized about came true. Almost lost ourselves right there, but we realized that even though we were feasting at every meal we were all getting hungrier and hungrier; can’t live on just fantasies.”

“No, you can’t,” Sansa agreed with a sad smile. It was a lesson she’d learned through much harsher methods.

“You won’t even believe me if I tell you about things getting odder than that, I don’t think,” Arya said, which was fair enough; Sansa already had strong doubts about an island of fantasies, though she supposed something could make everyone who went there hallucinate. “We kept going and going anyway, while things got stranger and stranger. Lost a few men to a giant bird that swooped out of nowhere, another to… to poison water, I guess you’d call it. But we didn’t do half bad. When you’re as West as you can get the sea becomes shallower and shallower, so it gets harder and harder to get a ship through. And just when you can’t sail any further, you see it in front of you; the most beautiful place you could ever imagine.”

Arya’s eyes were dreamy as though she saw it floating in front of her still, and Sansa reached out to squeeze her hand. “Is that where you’ve been all these years?” she asked softly, barely wanting to pull her from those dreams.

“No.” Arya shook herself out of her trance and repeated more firmly, “No. But there was a…” her eyes flicked to Sansa, searching her face like she was trying to figure out how to tell this story in a way she would accept, “A _person_. The ruler, I guess, of that land. He came, and he looked at me, and he said, ‘You’ve had a long journey, child. You can rest here at last, if you wish.’ And I _knew_ he meant more than just that one trip over the sea, that he could look in my face and see everything that had happened since we first left Winterfell, and was giving me the chance to… put it all down. And I knew too,” she clenched her hands into fists in her lap, staring down at them, “If I said yes I would be so content there that I’d never leave again. And Jon and you and Bran would never know what happened to me, I’d just be another stupid explorer who tried to see what was West and never got back, because they all probably said yes when they got there. So I told him, thanks but there was still world left out there for me to see.”

Sansa could hardly imagine it, a place so beautiful that you knew just from seeing it that you would never want to leave again. Not unless that place was Winterfell itself. She reached out to press her hand to Arya’s knee, but all she could think of to say was, “I’m so glad you came home instead.”

“Not for awhile still. When I said that he thought for a minute, all serious, then said ‘Then I could set you past my land, if that is what you wish, so you might see what’s further East’ and I told him he meant West, but he laughed this deep laugh and I knew that he had said what he meant. So I told him yes, if there was more to see we needed to see it, and just like that his land was behind us. We still don’t know how it happened, even coming back the same way.” She tilted her head back, thinking a minute before going on. “It was all the reverse, going on from there. Things got more and more normal, but it was more than that. The islands themselves were opposite each other. The one with the water, the first we’d seen it was the water itself that changed to hurt you when you touched it, on the other side it was the person doing the touching that did. We weren’t dumb enough to try going to the opposite of the fantasy island, but even from a distance it felt like something horrible just looking at it.”

“And when you got past all the islands?” Sansa asked, fascinated in spite of herself. Everything Arya said sounded too fantastical to be real, even having seen dragons and white walkers in her day, but she was so straight-forward in her telling that it was hard to believe she was speaking anything but the truth.

“When I reached the land on the other side?” Arya’s face split suddenly into a broad smile, and she said, “I found you a present, Queen Sansa.” 

She reached into a bag that she’d brought with her and pulled out a small painting, astoundingly detailed for its size, of two men and two women, all fair-faced and wearing crowns around their heads. “What is this, Arya?” Sansa asked when she handed it to her.

“Didn’t know if it’d actually be useful by the time I got back, but,” Arya tapped the faces of the two men in the painting, “King Peter. King Edmund. Queens Susan and Lucy, if you want to know them too. All siblings, not spouses. And from a country so far away they wouldn’t ever try meddling in the affairs of the North.”

“Arya, you can’t possibly be suggesting what I think you are.”

“Sansa, I know it sounds mad to let your unromantic little sister arrange a marriage for you, but their smallfolk _love_ them. Their nobles too. I never met a person there who didn’t, and that _doesn’t happen_, you know it doesn’t. And I had a talk on my way back and they’re not, I guess, supposed to be leaving any heirs for their country, for Narnia, but that doesn’t mean they can’t for somewhere else.” She reached out, looped her fingers through Sansa’s, looking at her with open love in her face like Sansa didn’t think she’d _ever_ seen Arya direct her way before, “I’ve spent the last few years with them, and with their people, and your distrustful sister really does think either of them would be as good to you as you deserve, Sansa, and you deserve so much better than you’ve gotten so far. I know King Peter, at least, was willing to make the journey if you wanted to try, I asked once. Do you want to try?”

Looking down at the painting, at the man whose eyes looked incredibly kind even in such diminutive form, knowing that Arya was the least likely person out of everyone she knew to show such faith in a person if they were undeserving, Sansa felt something inside of her stirring that she’d thought dead long ago. A girl who’d once believed in gentle princes and happily-ever-afters. It was that part of her that moved her lips and made her say, “I suppose I could try writing a letter. We can see what happens from there.”


End file.
